Prior to teaching 2nd and 3rd year students [52.225] CAD... with...

... the recommended text book - Computer Organisation & Design: The Hardware/Software Interface - by Patterson & Hennessy for the course lecture notes ;-)! Joking apart, the course text book* is essential reading IMHO. No doubt second-hand copies will be available from last year's students. The University Bookshop have many copies available too.

I taught a final year honours class using the first text book that H & P wrote. Ars Technica: Book review: Computer Architecture: a quantitative approach (9/99) says it better than I:

If anyone is qualified to talk about computer architecture, it's David A. Patterson and John L. Hennessy. Patterson was at the vanguard of the RISC movement; he published a number of seminal RISC papers and even coined the term RISC. He was the man behind the design of Berkely's RISC-I computer, the machine on which Sun's SPARC was based. His other contributions include leadership of the team that invented RAID, as well as research into computation using networks of workstations (NOW). John Hennessy was also one of the leaders of the RISC movement in the early 80's. He worked on the Stanford team that developed the MIPS architecture, and he later went on to found MIPS Computer Systems, which eventually merged with SGI. If you're a member of the ACM and/or you have access to their Digital Library, I'd recommend doing a search for either of these authors and reading some of their other published work.

The summer before teaching that final year honours class I was in the USA on vacation. A couple of weeks before flying out I e-mailed Profs Patterson and Hennessy in the hope that I could see them to discuss their courses and their textbook. I was honoured, and not a little surprised, that they both agreed to meet me whilst I was in California so I duly visted them at Berkeley and Stanford respectively. I took along my own copy of the hardback first edition of their book. It's now probably one of only a few that have been signed personally by both authors!! It has now pride of place in my bookcase ;-)